In her post transmitted below, my distinguished recipient Caitlin Johnstone addresses the quintessential subjectivity and malign utility of the essentially meaningless but hugely useful epithet "terrorist".
As veteran distinguished recipients are aware, this is a reality against which I have been pounding away for almost a quarter century (https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/terrorism-this-insidious-word and https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/07/terrorism-the-indefinable-word).
As I first wrote in 2001, "the poor, the weak and the oppressed rarely complain about 'terrorism'. The rich, the strong and the oppressors constantly do."
With their publics brainwashed to believe that "terrorism" is the ultimate evil, all that the rich, the strong and the oppressors need to do is pin the label "terrorist" on anyone they dislike and the people so labeled are instantly stripped of all rights and any due process and can be exterminated like vermin to widespread acquiescence or applause.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): British police arrested nearly 900 people over the weekend for expressing support for the peace activist group Palestine Action. Under UK law it is illegal to express favorable opinions about the group because London has deemed Palestine Action a terrorist organization, in the same category as ISIS or Al Qaeda. At the same time, the Trump administration is defending its assassination of a boat full of Venezuelans on the allegation that they were “narcoterrorists”, an imaginary category designed to lump garden variety drug traffickers in with suicide bombers and mass shooters. The word “terrorist” becomes more and more of a joke by the day. In the UK a terrorist is someone with a cardboard sign saying “I support Palestine Action”. In the US a terrorist is a Venezuelan suspected of drug trafficking. In Israel a terrorist is someone resisting occupation. We’re told Yemen is full of terrorists because they’re trying to stop a 21st century holocaust. We’re told Lebanon is full of terrorists because they oppose a genocidal apartheid state. We’re told Iran is full of terrorists because its government resists imperial regime change agendas. We were told Al Qaeda were terrorists because they perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, but when Al Qaeda helped the west get rid of Assad they suddenly weren’t terrorists anymore. Uyghur militants used to be terrorists, but they came off the list when they were deemed useful operatives against Beijing and Damascus. Iraq needed to be invaded because Saddam wanted to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, but after the invasion it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and then Iraq was suddenly plagued by an epidemic of suicide bombings. Afghanistan needed to be invaded because the Taliban was providing a safe haven for terrorists, but after 20 years of military occupation the empire needed its war machinery for other duties so they let the Taliban retake Afghanistan. In 2010, then-vice president Joe Biden proclaimed Julian Assange a “high-tech terrorist” because his journalism with WikiLeaks exposed US war crimes. Terrorism was used as an excuse to roll out the Patriot Act in the US and the Terrorism Act in the UK, and countless other authoritarian measures throughout the western world which tyrannical empire managers had been seeking to impose for years. Really “terrorist” just means someone the empire wants to kill or imprison, or a group whose terrorist designation might be used to justify the advancement of preexisting geostrategic agendas. Propaganda is used to sear events like 9/11 into western consciousness as examples of terrorism which must be prevented at all cost, and then this label “terrorism” is applied to literally anyone who poses an obstacle to the agendas of the western empire. Once it is accepted that there should be no rules restricting how the state responds to the threat of terrorism, all the state needs to do is label someone a terrorist to remove all rules which might stop them from doing whatever they want to do. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated right now than the ongoing genocide in Gaza which is being justified by the need to eliminate terrorists. When power-seeking empire architects are given limitless power to fight terrorism, we suddenly find ourselves in a world full of designated terrorists. The more despised the western empire becomes, the more “terrorists” there are going to be. Because a terrorist is anyone who takes action which inconveniences the empire. If this keeps up, soon we will all be “terrorists”.
©
2025 Caitlin Johnstone |